As an analytical chemist, I have to pay my respects to some early innovators in the field of instrumental analysis.
So let’s hear it for the guy who spent thirty years diligently weighing every last drop of his excrement. For science.
Today’s Moment of Science… Notorious Shitbagger, Sanctorius of Padua.
In 1561, Santorio Santori, aka Sanctorius, was born in the city of Capodistria, Italy (now Koper, Slovenia). The highly educated child of uppercrust fancypants parents, he was able to attend the University of Padua in 1575 and graduated with his medical degree in 1582. By the end of the century he set up a medical practice in Venice.
In 1611 he became a professor at his alma mater, chairing the department of theoretical medicine. Which begs the question, what wasn’t still theoretical in the field of medicine in the seventeenth century? The biggest breakthrough in treatment up until that point in history was probably eye glasses, and the microscope was only just invented after Sanctorius graduated from medical school.
Given the lack of equipment at that point, if you had a theory to test? You’d have to invent some shit. He crafted all sorts of gizmos, including a pulse rate meter called the pulsilogium. It was likely the first precision instrument in medical history. He also invented an early thermometer, a wind gauge, a water current meter, but enough about that shit.
Let’s focus on… shit. Excrement. Ca-Ca. Turds. Because goddamniit, that’s what he did. For decades.
I’m not sure how Sanctorius tripped over this bit of information or what made him decide to check it out, but he found that what he shoved into his mouth weighed significantly more than the bits that made it ringside. This was a mystery of the human body that drove him fucking bonkers.
He designed a rather impressive balance to plop his tuchus in for a spell. He weighed and recorded every bit of food and beverage that went into his body, and in his special chair, he weighed himself before and after eating. He would weigh any and all excrement. While he was sitting on the balance between eating and shitting though, he noticed something curious; his weight went down on its own without so much as a fart.
When he thought he had enough data from himself, he carried out the same study on patients. I’m not entirely sure what he told them this was treating, but really, this was one of those ‘apply cobwebs to treat nosebleeds’ centuries. Asking peasants in the 1600s to sit on your weird chair and please shit on a scale couldn’t have been too far removed from either medicine or religion.
Unfortunately, Sanctorius’s full data set from his patients has been lost to history. But his conclusions from self-experimentation were that for every eight pounds of food he consumed, only about three pounds splashed all the way down into his Venetian chamberpot.
So where in this shitstorm was the rest going, into thin air?
Well yes, actually.
Sanctorius developed the concept of perspiratio insensibilis, aka insensible perspiration. This isn’t the type of sweat dripping in a Gatorade commercial. This is coming off all the time, undetectably, even in a perfectly temperate environment while at rest.
He suspected we perspired via our pores and breathing, and lost about a half a pound a day via this route. For anyone in doubt of the imperceptible, he wrote in his famous book of medical aphorisms, De Statica Medicina, that it could “plainly be made appear by breathing upon a glass.”
Side note- I hunted down a copy of his book, translated from seventeenth century Latin to eighteenth century English. And look. This was a time when “Vomiting diverts urine and perspiration” and “They who piss more than they drink perspire little or nothing,” needed to be published in a fucking medical textbook. Which falls a bit shy of the wisdom employed at my 21st birthday party.
There’s an alarming amount of text devoted to shit, piss, and sweat. It’s balanced by advice on how to prevent corruption of the humors (allegedly the secret is ventilation).
Medicine had to start somewhere. Sanctorius was impressively close to deeper answers in his metabolic research. He died at the age of 74 in 1636, long before we’d discovered oxygen or nailed down how combustion worked. It would be another century before Antoine Lavoisier, the groundbreaking French chemist and tax collector, would even be born to shove the field forward again.
This has been your Moment of Science, absofuckinglutely reading the rest of De Statica Medicina now to punk friends with health tips from a famous doctor.
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In 1669, one Hennig Brand reduced bucket upon bucket of urine, finding a fine white powder as a residue that strangely glowed in the dark and burned briskly. He named it phosphorus mirabilis, we know it as white phosphorus. Red phosphorus goes into matchbook strikers.
Oh, for medical and urine, during WWII, when penicillin was still in short supply, the patients that received penicillin had their urine recovered and the unused penicillin was recovered and given to other patients.
I wrote about the discovery of phosphorus, it was one of the earliest MOS’s. Lord, I don’t want to know what that basement smelled like.
Wow, am I glad I tripped (aiw) over this, it will be a regular stop for me from now on!